A Family Holiday: Summer's Lease (John Mortimer)

 

 John Mortimer. Summer’s Lease (1988) Molly Pargeter, who carries the burdens of family life, arranges a Tuscan holiday in a rented villa for a her family. Her husband Hugh will of course take credit for the idea and the planning. Her randy father, a writer of occasional pieces for local newspaper, tags along. What follows is an apparently casual but carefully plotted ramble of a story, in which Molly’s obsessive search for the truth causes a calamity of which she is blissfully unaware. Some rifts are mended, some ambitions frustrated, nostalgia gets its due. Well done. ***

Rumpole's Creator

   John Mortimer.   Clinging to the Wreckage (1982) A re-read, and just as exhilarating and moving as the first time. Mortimer’s style is anecdotal: he’s a story teller, but an artful one, who knows how to bring the story to a point, a punch-line, or a twist that recasts the whole meaning of what he has told. The ambience is wry amusement at the follies of being human, and melancholy regret for the losses that make up our lives.

     The reminiscences about his father were made into a TV show, Voyage Round My Father, which I’ve seen, and recommend. Available on Youtube.
     Mortimer was apparently a good lawyer. His practice clearly informed Rumpole of the Bailey, which has the same combination of amusement and regret as this book. He was married twice, and had four children. He’s reticent about the details of his private life; the impression is of the same mix of joy and frustration that most of us know. Wikipedia gives more information.
     This book is worth reading in part because it’s a witness to England as it was between the world wars and after the second one. For Rumpole fans, it’s worth reading in any case. ****

Two Cartoon Collections

Bill Stott. The Crazy World of Gardening (1987) Any gardener will enjoy these cartoons, and non-gardeners who read this book will be glad they’ve avoided the pastime. One of my faves: Garden expert to troubled customer: “Yes, it’s a very common condition in plants that have been over-watered and kept in drafts. It’s called ‘dead’”. ***





Gary Larson. Wildlife Preserves (1989) The cover shows why Larson’s cartoons are still considered classics. I pretty sure he’s an acquired taste, though: the mix of logic taken to absurdity, disingenuous literalism, bland suburbanisms applied to non-human animals, allusions to scientific oddities, riffs on old movie cliches, and so on, doesn’t appeal to everyone. It does appeal to me. ****

Larson's Far Side (Gallery 5)

      Gary Larson. Far Side Gallery 5 (1995) I like Gary Larson’s cartoons. The absurdity of logic, the silliness of literalness, the effects of shifts in point of view, visual puns, send-ups of cliches – Larson was master of them all. Reading one of his collections expands your mind, twists it into new shapes, makes you laugh, and gives your imagination the kind of workout that liberates. We have a few of his collections, not nearly enough. More at his website.
****

Early Cary Grant vehicle

 

     The Amazing Adventure (1936) [D: Alfred Zeisler. Cary Grant, Mary Brian, Peter Gawthorne] A debilitated rich young man visits doctor who tells him he's suffering from money. Takes bet that he can’t last a year on his own, earning his own living. Finds out how the other half lives, also discovers that some people are kind, and some people are crooks. Helps first employer launch his extra-special cook-stove, defeats crooks, finds true love, rewards those who were kind, and fades out on clinch with wife who like him was taking a year off to earn her own money. The movie is barely an hour long, looks and feels like it was cut from a longer version. Pity. **

Spy Caper Spoof

      Spy (2015) [D: Paul Feig (also wrote), with Melissa McCarthy, Rose Byrne, Jude Law, Miranda Hart] Mildly amusing spy caper spoof in which a CIA desk-operative Susan Cooper (McCarthy) volunteers to take on a “track and report” field mission involving an international gang of suave psychopaths who are trading in suitcase-sized atom bombs.
The joke is that Cooper is not a svelte, elegant, self-confident wonder woman, but a dumpy, inelegant, unconfident woman who’s hopelessly in love with the spy (Jude Law) she assists. But she’s smart, brave, has trained in martial arts and firearms, and gains self-confidence as she outwits, outfights, and outshoots assorted baddies. The fun comes from McCarthy’s acting, our recognition of the James Bond tropes, the above averege script (although far more F-bombs than it needed), and the care taken to make all minor characters just caricatured enough for humour. The cast and crew obviously have a lot of fun too, which always helps. Enough (semi-plausible) plot twists to keep you watching.  I enjoyed it. **½

Three lads on a quest (The Quest, 2002)

The Quest (2002) [D: D. Jason. David Jason,  Hewell Bennett, Roy Hudd] Coming of age story shown as a flashback beginning when Charlie rear-ends Dave at a stop light. He invites Dave to his retirement party, at which Ronno, the third of the “three musketeers” also shows up. This sets off a round of reminiscences of their trip up north to the Lake District on motorbikes, in search of girls. It’s Charlie, the shy, soft-spoken one, who gets a girl, or rather, she gets him, but she rejects him later when he persuades the other two to go to Blackpool where she lives. A nicely done study of horny adolescent males. The girls are of course much wiser, and know perfectly well how to handle the lads. The movie ends with the men leaving a pub and agreeing to get together again.
     Part two begins with Charlie receiving a phone call from Sondra, an old flame. He’s on a ladder fixing the roof, and falls. When Dave and Ronno visit him in the hospital, we see the flash back to the lads’ trip to the Isle of Man, this time to ride the TTC course. But Charlie really wants to find Sondra, whose mother has other plans for her daughter and has forbidden the romance. This part is much piecier than the first one, there’s no solid central narrative line, things just happen. Charlie of course discovers that Sondra isn’t really interested in him, in fact she’s a little tart, but a nice beauty pageant contestant takes an interest in him, etc. When that episode falls apart, three older women pick up the boys, but the desired rendezvous is kiboshed by the landlady of the B&B at which the women are staying. So that’s that.
     There’s a part three, which I don’t have. I recorded these two parts on VHS years ago from TVO. I’m tossing the tapes, but decided to see what was in this one. If you like mildly amusing, nostalgia-inducing movies, you’ll probably like The Quest. It’s resolutely male point of view is unusual. **½
    

So’s Your Aunt Emma (1942)

     So’s Your Aunt Emma (1942) Zasu Pitts leads a cast of B-list actors working their way through a script concocted by someone who thinks a good idea is enough. The good idea is that a respectable old maid travels to the city to see the boxer son of the man she didn’t marry, gets entangled in gangster double crosses, and of course manages to  bring everything to a successful end. Love and justice triumph, as do the wholesome values of Aunt Emma.
     But the script hobbles along, the acting is merely competent, the photography ranges from average to awful, and the narrative pace is too slow even for 1942. One of those movies that could have been much better. The title is a catch-phrase of the times. Look in Wikipedia for more details.
     Definitely a B movie, second half of a double bill.  Mildly amusing as an example of Hollywood product. **

She Stoops to Conquer

She Stoops to Conquer at the Avon Theatre, Stratford. Directed by Martha Henry. Lucy Peacock, Joseph Ziegler, Maeve Beatty et al.
     Charles Marlow arrives at Hardcastle Hall thinking it’s an inn, and behaves abominably to both his father’s friend, Mr Hardcastle, and to his daughter Kate, whom he takes for the barmaid, and who both his father and Mr Hardcastle hope will prove a suitable match. Meanwhile, his friend George Hastings is courting Kate’s cousin by marriage, Constance Neville, niece of Mrs Hardcastle, who wants her son Tony Lumpkin (Kate’s stepbrother) to marry Constance. So you can see there is a lot of scope for misunderstanding and semi-successful attempts at deceptions and trickery.
     The question is whether this 18th century concoction will work in 2015. It was very popular in its time and ever since. The script has never been out of print, and it’s been “revived” every other year or so somewhere in the world.
     Goldsmith wrote the play to suit his audience. The style is wordy, everybody speaks polite English, most of the jokes depend on the class distinctions that mattered so much at the time. And that’s the problem. While I could understand that Marlow was misbehaving towards his host by treating him as an inn-keeper, I didn’t feel it. It wasn’t funny. The problem is that our standards of courtesy have changed, so seeing a gentleman treat another gentleman as a servant doesn’t raise a laugh. It’s just not prank material these days.
      So how do you play it? Do you portray Marlow as a boor, or as a bewildered victim? And how do you play Hardcastle? His protestations at the boorish behaviour of his guest must somehow play off his polite behaviour, since he knows Marlow is a gentleman and treats him as such. No wonder Marlow has a hard time reconciling the courtesy of his host with the poor service of the supposed inn.
     In short, the play’s premise is a problem. Marlow should come across as worthy of Kate. His honest love for her as barmaid suggests that he’s capable of ignoring the strictures of class and rank, but if he’s played as a boor, how are we to take the reveal scene in which he discovers that the barmaid is really Kate Hardcastle, whom he has just politely but firmly rejected? Is he an honourable man? Or is he just focussed on his desires, and just damn lucky that they happen to coincide with his father’s wishes after all?
     “We have all been adamant that these characters shall be real” writes Martha Henry. They should not be stylised modern take-offs on the 18th century roles. So we got a naturalistic interpretation of the roles, which worked quite well, despite the Avon Theatre’s atrocious acoustics, which swallow up conversation-level sound. The audience laughed often, so many of the jokes still work.
     But Goldsmith’s wordy style is not conversational. It’s also much of a muchness: the characters all talk the same way. That means we need more physicality in the acting. Henry writes that she and the cast wanted the characters to “live and breathe”. I suspect that this means she wanted people as like us as possible. She forgot that life-like is not the same as like life. The trick is to make unreality seem real. Goldsmith’s world is not our world. His attacks on sentimentality may suit us; but the expressions of sentimentality were different. Sentimentality is always stylised, it eventually becomes stale cliche. How to refresh the cliche so that it can be satirised? Not easy.
     Henry’s experiment in naturalism is a play that pleased but did not engage me. **½

The Taming of the Shrew.

Photo copyright Straford Festival.



     The Taming of the Shrew. At the Stratford Festival Theatre. Directed by Chris Abraham. Ben Carlson (Petruchio), Deborah Hay (Katherina), Sarah Afful (Bianca), et al.

     In many ways a traditional Shrew, this production succeeds on many levels. Unusually, it includes the Induction, heavily adapted, but a good reminder that what we are about to see is a play put on for a gullible old drunken fool. It’s a mix of farce, fantasy, and fun, not to be taken too seriously. The company emphasised the fun, and worked together to produce high-quality theatre, inspired and shaped by the traces of commedia dell’arte in the script.
     Except of course that the play does raise serious questions, as all plays do. The director notes that in Shakespeare’s time marriage was being redefined, as if that were news: marriage is always being redefined. But the comment does remind us of all the other plays in which Shakespeare deals with courtship and marriage. Even the history plays, whose stories focus on politics and power, show us that the personal is the essence of all relationships, regardless of the social constructs from which we can never completely escape, and which most of us find quite comfortable and even comforting templates for our social selves.
     We can’t avoid the misogyny in the Shrew. Petruchio uses sleep-deprivation and hunger.  The best that can be done is to downplay the brutality, and present Petruchio as acting a part. Well then, does he truly tame Kate? Or does she too act a part, merely to humour this crazy guy, until she can figure out some way of living with him. That she is attracted to him may be inferred from their first encounters, when he persists in flattering her despite her hostile responses.
     How you answer these questions determines the meaning of the rest of the play. Perhaps she simply decides to play along; that’s how Hay plays it when on the return to Padua she agrees that the sun is the moon, and the elderly gentleman is a sprightly maid. She’s decided to play the role of dutiful wife, but why? Has she fallen in love with Petruchio despite herself? He’s like her, after all: has she scented an equal, unlike the self-satisfied fops and fortune hunters who are wooing Bianca?
     Kate’s final speech, in which she scolds the supposedly good wives for their frowardness, demands an answer to those questions. Its significance depends on them. The script doesn’t give much help; it’s certainly defective, and just how much Shakespeare contributed to it is unclear. That means a director can emend and adapt to suit their vision. Whether we read the speech as a final submission, or as an offer of love to a husband who will be her equal as a human being, Petruchio’s response is unambiguous admiration for this wench that has become his wife, and that’s enough, I think, to add a modern twist to the play’s ending. I suspect that many in the original audiences hoped for or confirmed the satisfactions of their own marriages. We want Kate and Petruchio to have a satisfying marriage, otherwise we can’t read that unpleasant middle passage as the parody of courtship that a farce demands. When the play somehow convinces us of the changing perceptions and attitudes in both these headstrong people, it has succeeded. This production does so. Go see it. ***
     Toronto Star review here, and Globe and Mail review here.

Inside Out (2015)

     Inside Out (2015) [Director: Pete Docter, Ronaldo Del Carmen. Amy Poehler, Bill Hader, Lewis Black et al] 11-year-old Riley is moved from Minnesota (and hockey) to San Francisco (and home sickness) by her family. The parents have their own problems, delayed moving van etc, so don’t notice Riley’s sadness. Riley herself can’t allow herself to be sad, she must be “happy”, so she runs away. But it’s her sadness that brings her back home, where she cries, and the family unite in comforting each other. Simple story, the movie complicates it by showing five emotions (Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust, and Sadness) as controlling Riley’s perceptions, action, and relationships. Depicting that emotions are us was the aim of the moviemakers. The question is did they succeed?
     Yes and no. The switching between inside and outside was generally well done, one didn’t lose track of the story. The characterisation was a bit off, Joy was too bubbly-obtuse, Anger was merely hostility instead of focussed on unfairness, Disgust was too much of a fashion queen, Fear was a nerdy drip, and Sadness was dumpy, shy, passive, and lacking in confidence. She was actually the most complicated character. The animation was very well done, the design was stereotypical Disney, the conceptualisation of the different aspects of mind and self veered from the silly (Imaginationland misrepresented that most central cognitive faculty) to the poignantly nuanced (the pit of forgotten memories).
    “Piecey” Marie said, she’s right. Overall, a good attempt at doing an inherently difficulty job. The personalisation of mental faculties has an ancient history, the literary term is psyhcomachia. Interesting to see modern version. I think the desire to make the movie accessible to all age groups caused much of the variation in quality. The audience reaction indicated that the children followed the story easily, and if my response was typical, the adults read a more complex narrative. See the New York Times article by the scientific advisors. **½

Paddington (2014)

 Paddington (2014) [D:Paul King. Hugh Bonneville, Sally Hawkins, Julie Walters, and  Ben Wishaw voicing Paddington] I like Paddington Bear very much. Created by Michael Bond and starring in several books as well as an animated series for children’s television, he’s a hapless but friendly furry person whose enthusiastic naivete gets him into all kinds of scrapes. Here, sent to England by his Aunt Lucy after an earthquake destroys his home in “deepest Peru”, he yearns for a proper home and a family. He gets both, of course, but not until getting into all kinds of scrapes and being nearly murdered and stuffed by an ice-cold villainess.
   
     I enjoyed this movie. The makers wisely decided to play Paddington’s naivete for laughs while accepting the improbable premise at face value, and taking Paddington’s predicament seriously. Well done special effects, a narrative pace nicely tuned to children’s need for time to absorb plot-points and adults’ quicker uptake of the subtext, very well done animation, and characters complex enough to make us care for them but simple enough that we recognise the stereotypes immediately. Not the greatest movie ever made, but a well-crafted entertainment with hardly a false note. ***
 

Destry Rides Again (1939)

     Destry Rides Again (1939) [ D: George Marshall. James Stewart, Marlene Dietrich] The town of Bottle Neck is ruled by gangsters. Frenchy (Marlene Dietrich) is in league with them, and assists in defrauding a rancher of his property in a crooked card game. The sheriff who goes to investigate is killed, replaced by a drunk, who calls in Destry (James Stewart), the son of his old friend. But Destry doesn’t like guns. That’s the setup.
     So how will Destry tame the town? He does it by showing he’s a crack shot, but mostly by insisting he will enforce the law, and doing so even when he knows that the law favours the crooks. That insistence on law enables him to arrest the murderer of the previous sheriff, but when it gets out that he’s called in a federal judge to try the case, there is the inevitable gunfight. Frenchy, who is after all an immoral woman, dies protecting Destry.
     A nicely done movie which no longer seems mold-breaking. Hailed as a classic, it offered Stewart his first starring role, Dietrich’s come-back role.A mix of silliness and cliches masquerading as humour, well done photography, and an intelligent script add up to a pleasant hour and a half. It’s supposed to be a comic Western, and it does offer some laughs. But I have no desire to watch it again. **1/2

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011)

      The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011) [D: John Madden. Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson, Maggie Smith et al] A sweet feel-good movie about some elderly Brits looking for a cheap place to live out their years and perhaps fulfill a few dreams or fantasies. They land in the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, run by an enthusiastic but somewhat gormless lad whose mother wants him to sell the dump and marry a respectable girl. And so on. The stories intersect nicely, and everyone get more or less what they wish for and maybe even deserve. The theme is self-validation: what makes life worth living, if you can’t live with yourself? A heavy question, but dealt with lightly.
     A good script, it helps you over the humps of implausibility. Well acted by experienced pros, if you like Britcoms and British drama and movies, you’ve seen them all before. They know what they’re doing, and so does the director, who uses their strengths to woo us into that blissful state of believing the preposterous plot and recognising the wisdom in the many one-liners.
     The photography, music, and editing support the story, and don’t intrude on it. It’s based on a novel, which I suspect is summer beach reading. That’s what this movie is, too, a summer evening entertainment, pleasant, innocuous, and like all such apparently slight fluff containing depths that you don’t see until scenes pop into your present at odd moments. Well done professional entertainment. ***

The Philadelphia Story (1940)

     The Philadelphia Story (1940) [D: George Cukor. Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, James Stewart et al] Tracy Lord (Hepburn) is about to remarry, this time to George Kittredge (John Howard), a stuffy up-from-the-ranks mid-level executive. Her ex C. K Haven (Grant)  arranges for Macaulay Connor (Stewart) and Liz Imbrie (Ruth Hussy) of Spy magazine to pose as friends of Junior Lord and so get the story and the photos that will boost Spy’s circulation. The perfect mix of characters and situation for a successful rom-com, with elements of coming-of-age, social comedy, and satire of the tabloid business, which was beginning to morph into the rapacious sludge-dwellers that we love to detest.
     The movie is beautifully photographed (Joseph Ruttenberg). The editing is well done (Frank Sullivan), but the pace seems slow compared to current practice. The acting is near-perfect, a lovely mix of stereotype and playing against type. Stars have a difficult task: to provide what the audience expects without become mere cartoons. Grant, Hepburn, and Stewart deliver. The script is based on a play, which accounts for the throw-away one-liners, and the complex dialogue. This is one of the few movies that you have to listen to as well as watch.
     The character actors show why Hollywood could churn out well-crafted movies week after week: they supply the base on which the stars are built. A director who knows how to use them will make a better movie. Cukor knows how to use all his cast. The movie is usually classed as comedy of manners, but it’s more than that. Cukor is sometimes under-rated because he specialised in these movies designed for a primarily female audience. I like them, perhaps because I read a lot of women’s fiction in my mother’s magazines, so I can recognise an above average example when I see it. This is definitely above average. Recommended. ***½

The Taming of the Shrew. At Freewill Shakespeare, Edmonton.

 

     The Taming of the Shrew. At Freewill Shakespeare, Edmonton. [D: Marianne Copithorne. With Mary Hulbert, James MacDonald et al] Ah, TTotS, a play that will annoy some part of the audience no matter how it’s done. The Freewill Shakespeare Company opted for farce, irony, modernising the mise en scene, and a hefty reminder of the Commedia dell’Arte heritage of the play. This worked quite well, although the visuals were sometimes overdone.
     The crucial question about this play is how to imagine Katherine the Shrew and Petruchio the fortune hunter. It’s clear enough that she behaves as she does because she thinks she’s unlovable. Her sister, who could a keep a pound of butter cooling in her mouth, is Daddy’s Darling, and a manipulative little bitch. How can Katherine compete with that? She can’t, so she overacts the reputation imposed on her.
     Petruchio, who decides that the rich dowry that comes with Katherine is worth working for, discovers almost immediately that Katherine’s unwillingness to conform to social expectations matches his own. All he has to do is to tame her, and convince her that he loves her despite her rage. There are enough hints in the text for an imaginative director to emphasise these aspects of character and plot, and Copithorne IMO succeeds. She has a clear vision of what she wants, both in the staging of the play as a farce, and in the subtext about courtship, love and marriage that informs the rather silly plot.
     The actors bring out the subtext nicely. We see from the first kiss that Katherine and Petruchio are attracted to each other almost despite themselves. By the time we see Katherine address the old man on the road as a fair young damsel, we intuit that she is playing a game, and furthermore that Petruchio knows it. In the final speech, where she describes the proper relationship between husband and wife, we see that she understands her own words doubly. On the one hand, given the social and economic realities of the time, a wife was utterly dependent on her husband. On the other hand, she has come to respect Petruchio as her equal, which he acknowledges by kneeling before her. We know that the practicalities of household and estate management will not interfere with their enjoyment of each other.
     Set changes were nicely done, music was well chosen, incidental business was both suitable and well-done, the company displayed excellent ensemble acting, all in all a very pleasant evening at the theatre. Recommended. ***½

The Life of Python (2000)

     The Life of Python (2000) A compilation of clips and interviews, plus an English version of one of the two German episodes for Westdeutscher Rundfunk, made in 1972. The interviews are strictly for Python fans, the selected clips will raise a Huh? Or a chuckle or a guffaw, depending on your fan status. The Dead Parrot is missing, and none of the clips is complete. The German episode includes a long sketch based on a mix of Grimm fairy tales, suitably messed up and parodied, and a real treat for fans. I’m a fan, I thought this three-video set was worth watching, but non-fans will no doubt find it merely average. It’s from Jon’s collection. ***

The Talk of the Town (1942)

     The Talk of the Town (1942) D: George Stevens. Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, Ronald Coleman] One of the great Hollywood comedies when Hollywood made great comedies. Leonard Dilg (Cary Grant), a falsely accused prisoner escapee, holes up in the house that a stuffy law prof, Michael Lightcap (Ronald Coleman), is renting for the summer, and Nora Shelly (Jean Arthur), the teacher who owns the house, becomes the prof’s secretary/cook. The three develop a nice relationship, and when mob-violence and obvious corruption become too much for the prof to ignore, he takes the case, finds the man whose supposed death has earned Dilg the murder rap, and makes a Grand Speech when he interrupts the trial, which is about to turn into a lynching. Lightcap gets his seat on the Supreme Court, the crooked factory owner and bent judge who concocted the plot against Dilg are indicted, and Dilg and Shelley end up in each other’s arms.
     As you can see, a preposterous plot, but it doesn’t harm a well-directed, fast-paced, well-acted and photographed movie. The three stars are pros, they act their parts with just enough conviction to make us believe the silly story. The supporting actors are pros, too, and every one does at least a workman-like job. The centre of the movie is Nora Shelley: Jean Arthur is an under-rated actor, I think. The situations sometimes reach the absurdist heights of a Laurel & Hardy, and the second ending showing Shelley choosing Dilg over Lightcap is contrived. But so’s the whole movie, really, so a shift in tone is as logical as all the other plot twists.
     We enjoyed this movie, it holds up well. ***

Garrison Keillor. Pontoon (2007)

     Garrison Keillor. Pontoon (2007) “A novel of Lake Wobegon”, according to the subtitle. It’s a novel only in the sense that there is am extended central narrative line that ties all the stories past and present together. Evelyn Peterson has died, her daughter Barbara arranges the disposal of her ashes as requested, and realises that like her mother she needs freedom to be herself. She has spent too much time adapting herself to other people’s wishes and expectations. A couple of other stories intersect, making for a bizarre finale, but much of the book deals with Evelyn’s and Barbara’s history. Each chapter advances our knowledge of these two central characters, as well as several other citizens of Lake Wobegon. The style and form is that of Keillor’s radio tales, rambling, apparently formless, yet always arcing back to whatever motif or theme began the tale. A good read, improved if you’ve heard Keillor’s News From Lake Wobegon, and can read with his voice in your head. *** (2010)

Johnny English (2004)

     Johnny English (2004) [D; Peter Howitt. Rowan Atkinson, Natalie Imbruglia, John Malkovich] A satire on James Bond movies that is good in parts.  Pascal Sauvage, a descendant of the Plantagenets, steals the Crown Jewels and forces Elizabeth II to abdicate. Then he offers himself as King. Johnny English, newly minted MI5 agent, must stop this dastardly plot. He succeeds despite himself, of course. There are some very good bits, but they don’t jell into the kind of seamless absurd logic of, for example, the best of the Pink Panther movies. Or Laurel and Hardy, or Buster Keaton. Still, the movie gave us an enjoyable hour and a half. **